Wild & Wonderful

This single-level house with its modern-rustic aesthetic is set in a location that evokes superlatives, but the inner experience is just as special as the outer. It's warm and stylish, with a personality that turns up the welcome. 

Home owners trusted in Lynda Murphy, the Architect, to understand their dreams, giving her some photos of the section, contours, levels and an idea of how they live and she provided just what they were after. Simultaneously, they were searching for a builder and long admired a number of David Reid Homes, both in Auckland where they used to reside and Queenstown. They liked the style of the architecture, the attention to detail and knew the business had a good reputation. 

Nestled into the alpine environment, the home looks away from using lots of shiny stainless steel and glass for a more relaxed, earthy feel and wanted something a bit different. The house is clad in cedar, and the vertical boards have a textural 3D profile and are light stained to match the surrounding tussock. At first, home owners thought of corrugated iron and then weathered steel as cladding, but Aaron from David Reid Homes Waitaki steered them clear. Instead, to break up the timber, there are elements of weathered steel at the entrance while, on the north-east corner of the dwelling, schist sourced from Cluden quarry features.

The material theme is picked up indoors with a wall of weathered steel behind the living room wood burner and in the L-shaped kitchen, where the island bench features the same random-width-and-depth cedar cladding. The interior is taking inspiration from the colours of the nearby Lindis Valley: ochres, yellows and burnt orange. In the bathrooms, the tiler was challenged by the home owner to use some decorative tiles gifted to her by her brother. That is not the only piece of family history woven into the scheme. In the long hallway, there's a mural of a hand-drawn blueprint of a ventilation system, the home owners father was a sheet-metal worker who designed it for a hospital in California, which they have had printed onto vinyl. Creating a talking point within the warm, rustic home.

Photography by Mike Langford